Initiated in 2010, IGNITE! Festival of Contemporary Dance is conceived
as a space for dance that is rooted in experimentation, criticality and
provocation. It has successfully completed three editions in Nov 2010,
Nov 2012 and Jan 2015. IGNITE! is a biennale that aims to give
high-quality Indian contemporary dance public visibility, showcase
creativity and innovation in Indian dance, support the development of
vibrant, new artistic work and facilitate collaborations amongst a wide
range of dance organisations in the country. IGNITE! has been
instrumental in creating an open platform where diverse contemporary
dance practices are made accessible to a large number of audiences.

In its 4th edition, scheduled for Oct 9 – 16, 2016, with a satellite
festival in Jaipur on Oct 18-19, 2016, the festival is structured around
the central themes of form, identity and dissent. With the body forming
the core of critical choreographic practices throughout history, the
curation of the festival programme will explore dance and performance as
a medium to question, to share, to resist, defend or argue.

IGNITE! is an initiative of Gati Dance Forum, an independent,
not-for-profit arts initiative that works in the field of contemporary
dance. Founded in 2007, in response to the absence of opportunities and
infrastructure for independent dance in India, Gati works towards
creating a collaborative ecosystem, which supports dance practice in
India that is dynamic and sustainable.

• The premiere of #INTERSECT, an ongoing project by the Devi Art
Foundation and the Gati Dance Forum, with three commissioned
collaborations between visual artists and dancers who explore the
vocabularies that emerge at the intersection of contemporary art and
dance.

• REMEMBERING CHANDRALEKHA, an exhibition curated by her long-time collaborator
Sadanand Menon, with archival photographs of the legendary dancer/ choreographer and her choreographic oeuvre.

• The launch of TILT | PAUSE | SHIFT: DANCE ECOLOGIES IN INDIA, a new
book of critical writing on dance in contemporary India.

• Film screenings

PERFORMANCES
The performances at IGNITE! 2016 continue to encourage us to read
contemporary dance, and consequently, present-day society, through the
lens of form, identity and dissent.

-In NH7, Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy writes home about rural migration and
the dizzying pace of urbanisation that transforms his city even as he
finds his bearings in it.
-Manju Sharma, in RUSH HOUR, finds humour and monotony as bodies and automobiles become metaphors for one another.
-Daniel Kok brings to us a critique of identity, with his ironic take on
navigating Europe as an Asian artist in CHEERLEADER OF EUROPE.
-Nimmy Raphel finds a springboard in the Ramayana, linking the lifelines
of two of its key characters through sleep – the absence and presence
of it – in NIDRAVATHWAM.
-Meanwhile, in UNSEEN, alert to regressive positions on the place of
women in society, Kalyanee Mulay and Vishnupad Barve revisit the
strongly feminist arguments of the 19th century activist Pandita
Ramabai.
-Sujata Goel explores the construction of gesture and meaning in DANCING
GIRL, challenging the politics of exotica and a Eurocentric
understanding of contemporary dance aesthetics.
-In FIELD, casting three bodies into a magnetic web of force, Tabea
Martin tries to understand what drives people and how they can engage
with each other.
-Finally, in CONDITIONS OF CARRIAGE, as ten dancers negotiate the force
of gravity, to jump, Preethi Athreya poses tough questions about our
expectations of performance and the fragility of the body and its
endurance.

#INTERSECT: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION
#INTERSECT emerges out of an ongoing collaboration between the Devi Art
Foundation and Gati Dance Forum to explore the potential languages
emerging at the intersection of contemporary art and dance. While
anchoring itself as a space for experimentation, it engages with the
current political climate through a process of discovery and
introspection that pushes the boundaries of form, content and place. The
project proposes a collaboration between contemporary dance
practitioners and visual artists to produce three new works that will be
premiered at IGNITE! 2016. This collaboration facilitates the
practitioners to envision processes that emerge at the intersection of
their artistic languages, expanding the questions around identity and
dissent.

CONFERENCE
Resonating with the festival’s theme of FORM | IDENTITY | DISSENT, the
conference places the body at the centre of a complex interrogation that
considers how the body has been informed by, and informs, several
processes, politics and histories. The dancing body is encouraged to
speak independently, distinguishing itself from the multiple discourses
that it is subject to. We begin to look at dance practice in its various
historical, social, political and personal contexts.

Finally, Form | Identity | Dissent places contemporary dance in an
interdisciplinary web, where conversations are had in the realm of
ideas. This strand of the conference emerges from How to Stage, a series
of interdisciplinary conversations between performance makers,
archivists, anthropologists and cultural theorists in the interest of
unearthing a discursive ground for the language of multiple practices.

Form | Identity | Dissent is curated by Ranjana Dave in collaboration with Priya Srinivasan and Zuleikha Chaudhari.